


Banshee

by orphan_account



Series: After Crucible [4]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Banshees, Gen, Synthesis Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-06
Updated: 2013-05-06
Packaged: 2017-12-10 14:23:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/787046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post Synthesis ending. </p><p>A banshee reawakens on Earth. </p><p>Warning: depiction of child death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Banshee

**1.**  
At first she doesn't know what she's doing. 

Her hand is enveloped in the chest cavity of a human child. Its small, broken ribs are biting into her wrist and her fingers are wrapped around its heart in an exchange of suffering that favours her by no small measure. The smell of its blood is narcotic, wrapping around her warm and ominous like a lover she wants to osmose into, to grind against until her skin is coated in a layer of their cells. Temptation isn't just tickling the edges of her mind; it's running its supple tongue all across her body, urging her on, poisoning her into continued atrocity, tightening her palm around the small, pulsating muscle until an artery pops. 

Then, in a wash of green light, the universe shifts; it changes but it doesn't change, relinquishing one bloody inevitability in exchange for another. Flesh earns the efficiency of mechanical functionality. Code and metal become supple with life. Universality reasserts itself as separate to equality. The cycle continues. 

And she reawakens as the lowest form of existence, caught in the throes of murder. Not clean murder, or quick murder, or even the kind of artistic murder that tantalizes innate depravity. Just simple, carnal murder wherein she tortuously chokes the life out of a child by suffocating its veins. 

There's a pinch in her stomach and she's never felt anything like it before. Every time the child cries, the pinch tightens. Every time its slowed heart takes another futile beat, it becomes a gouge so deep she's surprised it doesn't kill her outright. Interspersed in the chant of _feed, feed, feed_ drumming through her mind is a more complicated word, _stop_ , and something inside her chest swells whenever it manages to rise above the cacophony. 

She stops. She thinks; almost. She breathes. She smells the approach of new human blood softened by skin, nuanced by sweat. She listens, hears them screaming as their bodies change, hears them stomping around, their movements erratic, their heavy boots hitting hard against asphalt streets. 

And she runs.

The child bounces against her hip, limp and stained like a well-loved doll. She carries it with an innocence that belies her guilt; she carries it because it still feels right in her hand, because she's kind enough now not to leave a corpse behind somewhere children play, because it's all she has. 

**2.**  
She knows the dead child's blood isn't alone beneath her fingernails but she can't conceptualize how many more lives she's drained into her cupped hands. A husked brain doesn't think in details, only in impulses. Eradicate. Survive. Overcome. Feast, feast, feast, feast, drink. Nothing she can channel into something more rational, nothing but an incoherent onslaught of ones and zeroes masquerading as words. 

So she doesn't think on it for very long. Shuts her eyes. Lets her mind chase thoughts like a child in pursuit of a butterfly until her brain tires itself out and cleanses her of everything but for the fact that she woke up with her hand around a tiny heart. 

**3.**  
There are hundreds of years worth of memories intricately folded into her mind like an endless field of little origami flowers, but she can't figure out how to work her thoughts inside their folds to ease them open and discover how they once seeded her life to define her existence. It's an improvement over her earlier state of self-awareness in the sense that her mind is allowing her to hold on to more and more each day, but it hurts in ways that not knowing hadn't. 

Not all the memories are beyond her though. Some are pliable from use, soft enough that she can prod them into bloom without much resistance. In her very favourite one, she's a little asari girl with milky blue skin and feathery white wings strapped to her back. Two grown-ups are with her and when she runs, they run, their arms spread out as though they, too, can propel themselves to the stars through the pure force of a child's imagination. 

The little girl is Varimmia T'Zuni. She is from Thessia and she's never, ever been to Earth. When she finds herself there hundreds of years later, she'll never, ever figure out how she made it without her wings and she'll never, ever figure out how to get back home.

But don't tell her that; it'll break what's left of her heart. 

**4.**  
She stays in an abandoned shed outside an abandoned barn surrounded by at least a square mile of abandoned farms. The child she killed stays there with her, tucked away in a corner where it sleeps and sleeps and decays. 

At night, she tries to tell it bedtime stories but she can't figure out how to coordinate her tongue and her mouth the right way to make words so all she manages to do is wail into the silence to nobody at all. 

**5.**  
There aren't many turians in Britain. A small squadron here and there. Some on reconaissance, some working assistance, others survivors who were shot down from the sky. When they look at her it's with disgust, mostly, but sometimes there's fear in their eyes as well. They've seen others like her before and they know – perhaps physically, perhaps intimately – how easily she can kill and how stubbornly she will refuse to die. 

None of them talk to her at all for a very long time until, suddenly, one does. 

Ten hours of wandering in search of survivors and she's the first living thing he sees. He has sandy brown skin and wears a white skull painted on his face, but as far as she's concerned he's silver with gray eyes and mandibles gilded in fine goldenrod webbing. When he introduces himself as Hictius she shakes her head no, because that's not his name at all; he is Varturos and they are in love. 

“Shit, look at you,” he says. 

Though she doesn't understand him, she still lets out a low, crooning wail; her way to express happiness while words still fail her. He circles around her. There's nothing predatory about the way he moves and she's soothed by his presence. Trusting. Enraptured. Whole in a new way. She wants to take him home with her, keep him in her shed so he's there when she returns at night; she wants him to tell the dead little child the stories she cannot, wants to hear his voice until her traumatized memories emerge to join its echoes. Quick like gunfire, she reaches out and wraps her long fingers around his wrist and tries to pull him home, where he belongs. 

But he doesn't allow her the lead. Instead, he says, “Whoa there,” and holds something out to her. Round and red in a way that human blood will never be, she thinks it's the most beautiful thing she's seen, and she releases his wrist so that she can take it in both of her palms, cradling it like a treasure, perfectly awed by the weight of it and by its stillness, and by the fact that it is a gift from her love.

“Eat,” he says, then mimes the act. 

Something like pride flutters against her heart like the wings of a little asari girl who believes she can fly. She remembers eating so she follows the command. It feels good to be guided again. It feels right. 

“Eat,” he tells her after every bite. “Eat, eat, eat.” And once she has eaten it all, the entire apple, he proffers his wrist again and motions for her to take it, to guide him wherever she had wanted to earlier. A little kindness to sweeten the efficiency with which he has just become her killer. 

Just a little of it, just a little too late. 

**6.**

Now she wails with the pain of a betrayed child; now she is weak, now she is so plump with toxins that she can barely move, now she is on the ground writhing into the lush mud. 

**7.**  
 _His hands ascend the curve of her breasts with a tentativeness that magnifies his eagerness. Her hands brush beneath his mandibles as she raises his head to meet her eyes. She's never melded with anyone before, never been enough in love. But Varturos is the kind of special that divides her life into a before and an after centred around him, and there is nothing she wants more from the universe than for it to allow her to connect with him completely._

It doesn't.

As she dies, she thinks, for the first time, that she understands how Varturos felt when the force of her love blew blood through his brain, so much blood that he was never the same again. Neither was she. Neither was her concept of love and home and the future because there was little of any of that on Lesuss. 

She hopes that when he finds the little human child in the little farmyard shed, he comes up with something better to tell her than stories of lovers and killers. 

**8.**  
 _Once upon a time the world was a cruel place and then it became cruel in an entirely new way._

_The end._

_(there is no end)_


End file.
